31 March, 2016

Review – Rise of the Tomb Raider, Cold Darkness Awakened

Some darkness’s are best left well alone, cold or otherwise.
It’s not that this darkness is particularly scary, though it is dark, but it
should certainly never be awakened.

Cold Darkness Awakened

Marking what appears to be the end of the second act of
Lara’s rebooted explorations, Cold Darkness Awakened really had a lot to live
up to. Not only was Rise of the Tomb Raider a great game, one of the best of
2015 in my opinion, but also the two previous add-ons; Endurance, a
surprisingly fun and fitting challenge mode of sorts, and Baba Yaga, Temple of
the Witch, a bite-sized chunk of Lara doing what she does best. Cold Darkness
Awakened in many ways, fills an awkward middle ground between the systems-drive
Endurance mode and the story-driven Baba Yaga, and does so poorly.

Accessible through the expeditions menu, Cold Darkness is a
standalone experience, with challenges, scoring, and card slots. The loading
screen features narration by a Soviet scientist who, in an effort to create
super soldiers, ended up birthing zombies. No, I’m not paraphrasing for comedic
effect; there is no illusion to anything less rote.

It is impossible for me to know for certain of course, but
the dialog would not be entirely out of place if it was split across audio logs,
like those found in the campaign. That format facilitates deeper exploration of
the concepts at play, in a rewarding breadcrumb manner, whereas the loading
screen dump is shallow and more than a little jarring. And that’s not the only
reason I think Cold Darkness was at some point intended to be a more fleshed
out, campaign-integrated story mission.

When the gameplay begins, you get a smidge more narrative courtesy
of Nadia and Sophia, two notable characters from the Baba Yaga and base game,
respectively, as Lara is dropped into a Soviet facility. However, the dialog is
written to imply that the zombies – I don’t believe they ever actually use that
word – were a problem before arriving at the Soviet facility, and that the
toxins apparently spreading in the air that Lara knows so much about need to be
stopped. ‘What zombies?’, and, ‘which toxins?’, would both be fair questions to
ask at this point. The answer Cold Darkness Awakened gives, is in short; the
ones you’re going to shoot, now hush and climb this tree.

The one area, a Soviet facility, is a fairly large one; it
is also virtually pitch black, save Lara’s torch beam and that of the
helicopter overhead – why yes, the two medieval valley-dwellers can speak
perfect, unaccented English and pilot a helicopter. And infested with
‘infected’ Trinity Soldiers; zombies wearing trunks no Trinity mercenary ever
wore in public, equipped with knives and other assorted non-firearms. These
zombies swarm the area and respawn constantly. Fortunately, their eye-sight is
terrible and they won’t respond to the direct light or Lara’s torch until they
are within a meter or two, but they boast comparatively keen hearing.

The gibbering infected are fast and deadly; on the normal
‘Tomb Raider’ difficulty, Lara can be killed in just a hit or two depending
upon the type of zombie. Curiously the larger infected, the armoured variants,
seem to ‘die’ in a single body shot from the revolver, while the bare-chested
common ones may take two or three, encouraging headshots. Bizarrely, some run
at you with live explosives, not only odd from a ‘lore’ perspective, but
totally unnecessary from a gameplay standpoint, given the devastating close
range attacks of the normal zombies. Additionally, I’ve seen multiple instances
of them glitching through objects, sometimes because of something I’ve done,
other times completely of their own volition, in the case of one zombie that
teleported on and off a head-high ledge repeatedly while on patrol.

In the large open area, weapons can be scavenged and
prisoners freed. All the prisoners are women; there is a throwaway line about
women not being infect-able, solving the quandary of Lara’s necessary immunity,
and potentially halving the number of enemy character models that needed to be
created. It is not a fun place to be in though, which is the real
issue; you can’t see enough of the environment to fully game and conquer it,
and the numerous enemies simply aren’t rewarding to fight, especially in such
large, unwavering numbers. Cold Darkness Awakened simply doesn’t use the
environment, or any of Lara’s traversal skills to good effect.

To stop the infected, Lara has to fiddle with three
virtually identical stations across the map. Once inside the first, the women
on the radio will explain that red paint and a flame symbol means flammable,
that blue and a water drop means water, and so on through all four types of
coloured objects. Not only is this insulting to the player’s intelligence,
their ability to puzzle out anything in the environment, it is unreasonable
that these totally isolated village dwellers would be able to read a manual –
who knows where that came from – and equally, that Lara couldn’t distinguish
between a water and fire symbols unaided, but more over it is completely
unnecessary. There is no functional difference between the water or radioactive
material pipes or levers, except colour and symbol, the mission text which
we’ll discuss shortly, only ever mentions colour, making the reprehensible
cutscene explaining each type of pipe entirely redundant. It is not even a well-considered
accessibility aid for people with colour blindness, so far as I can tell, because
the use of colour in the mission text requires the player to distinguish
colours anyway, or at least remember the matching symbol and colour.

A series of tasks are given by the women on the radio, such
as; if there are there are an even number of red fuses in the three fuse boxes,
lower the blue conduit, else crank the green lever. Good luck finding any of
the above items in the multi-storeyed, shadowed silos, patrolled by the worst enemy
type in the whole game. If you get one of the riddles wrong, the building will
flood with zombies for a minute or two. After dealing with three such stations,
it’s on to the big facility in the middle, where Lara has to shoot half a dozen
pistons and try not to die. That’s it. Game Over.

You could, theoretically, play it again on higher
difficulties, complete challenges, and spice up your time with cards, but it
certainly doesn’t earn that much of the player. Cold Darkness Awakened is an experience
that manages to abuse just about every aspect of the Tomb Raider formula that
it lays its dirty claws on. The narrative, such as it is, seemed disjointed and
patched together, rather than simple scant, while the gameplay is actively bad.
Ill-conceived and disappointing all around.